Vembu BDR Suite: VM Backup – First Impression and Installation

Vembu has reached me and gave me an opportunity to test their flagship product Vembu BDR Suite, and I developed a Lab with a Backup server to test Vembu products. Before we start I’d like to give you the background of the company, company was founded in 2002 and currently serving more than 60,000 businesses all over the world.

Initially, Vembu’s product was around SQL Migrations and then they focused on Backup strategies, now it has been over 10 years and company developed with the more capable backup and disaster recovery solutions. Important thing of their products is the number of solutions provided for the different platforms including VMware, Hyper-V, Image backup, Network Backup, Cloud Disaster Recovery, Online Backup, SaaS and Management and Monitoring tools, also Vembu supports for Applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Sharepoint and Cloud products such as Google Apps and Office 365 and also you can store them in offsite ,onsite store or even to the cloud. I think below product download portal will give you a clear insight of the capabilities of these products.

You can access and download these products from Vembu Portal, If you don’t have an account you can easily sign up for the portal account and one of their agents will reach you shortly.

Once you got access to the portal you can see some greater features in the portal, You can see the licenses usage in the Dashboard, also Products, Licenses, Subscriptions, Billing Address, all invoices, BDR Server information, Purchase history and Profile can be update in the same page.

I don’t have License yet for my BDR Server

So Let’s see how we can configure the Vembu VM backup in the VMware Environment

Vembu VM Backup Installation

To Download the VM Backup Click on the Download under Vembu VM Backup

Click on the Download Installer and you can see the Supported Operating Systems which you can install the BDR Suite

These are the supported Operating Systems:

Windows Server 2012 R2 (64 Bit)

Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 Bit)

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2016

Windows 10 (64 Bit)

Once You downloaded the Setup run the Installer

Installer will start and click on Next in the Welcome Window

Accept the License agreement and click Next

You can customize the configuration by selecting the checkbox and you can see the default configuration

If you wish to change the configuration you can change the configuration in the next step and click Next to continue

Select the Installation folder

Select the Drive letter for the Storage Repository in the next step

Note: C: Drive is not recommended by the vendor

If you select the C: drive as the Storage repository below warning message will appear on the screen

Also, adding a Shared folder (CIFS/NFS) is also supported and NAS and SAN devices connected using NFS or CIFS supported

You can change the Webserver port, admin username and password in the next window. Change the details according to your requirement and click Next to continue the installation

Click Install to begin the installation

Installation will install the necessary packages to your server and Click Finish to Start the services and open the Web Console (You can select these options from the check boxes)

Once it opens the Web Console type your username, password and click Sign in

Select the Time Zone for your BDR Server and click on Save

Provide a unique ID for your BDR Server Vendor recommends MACHINENAME.DOMAIN name for this because it is an unique id, click on Update the submit the changes

Once you submit the changes we need to register the BDR server

Register Your BDR server

Once you installed the Vembu Suite as the first thing you have to register the server in the portal to generate the licenses

Go to Management -> Server Management -> Server Registration

Click on Register to register your BDR server

Provide your Portal account credentials, BDR ID you have provided will pick automatically to the registration, Provide the credentials and click on Register to complete the registration

Once you Successfully connected the BDR server to the portal you can see the Portal Account ID and you can sync your server with portal by clicking on the Run License Check button, however this operation will automatically complete for every 24 hours.

You can see the Server information in the Portal under Server Info page

Registration is now completed and let’s see how we can connect the vCenter server to the BDR server

Connect vCenter Server to the Vembu BDR server

Provide the vCenter Server details,credentials and port to communicate with the vCenter server, click on Save

You can see the added vCenter server after that in the Console

So I’d like to run a backup and restoration procedure in a different post as this post is going to be a long post. So stay tuned, let’s see how we can backup and restore the Virtual Machines and what are the available option in this backup configuration

My Thoughts

This is was the first experience with Vembu backup and it was quite easy process to start work with the product. I was easily create an account in the Vembu portal and soon after I completed the Sign in process I got an email from one of their agents asking a convenient time for a walkthrough of their products and details under Vembu BDR suite. He was willing to help me to find the best choice for my requirement and the environment.

There were few links to their product configuration guides and procedures. Also, a summary of the best practises and and initial access procedures soon after the installation of the product. There were some useful email contacts for technical assistance and the sales. Also, you can request a support assistant during the evaluation when you click on the download, below widget will appear on your screen and you can easily request assistance by submitting the form

From the Installation point of view it was pretty easy task. Anyone who has the software installation experience can easily install the BDR Suite within couple of minutes, there was no separate database configuration Postgres database is installing automatically in the same server, so I did not want to worry about any Database configuration. Soon after the completion of the installation application was ready to use and Web console opened in my screen. It has a simple and user friendly dashboard for the rest of the configuration.

Adding my vCenter was just few clicks and it was added easily, so far according to my experience it was quite simple easy and straightforward to configure the BDR server. Let’s see what are the options of the Backup and Restoration procedures and how feasible these options in my next post. So, stay tuned!

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About the Author

Senior Virtualization Engineer at Pearson, Sri Lanka. Technology junky, enthusiast, a VMware vExpert and a blogger with more than five years of Experience in Information Technology more focusing on VMWare Virtualization, Microsoft and Datacenter Technologies.